Decoding Your Emotional Blueprint

Tami Simon (0:00)

Welcome to Insights at the Edge, produced by Sounds True. My name is Tami Simon. I'm the founder of Sounds True, and I'd love to take a moment to introduce you to the Sounds True Foundation. The goal of the Sounds True Foundation is to provide access and eliminate financial barriers to transformational education and resources, such as teachings and trainings on mindfulness, emotional awareness, and self-compassion. If you'd like to learn more and join with us in our efforts, please visit soundstruefoundation.org.

In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Judy Wilkins-Smith. Judy is a highly regarded organizational, individual, and family patterns expert. She combines a systems-based approach with constellation work to coach high-performing individuals, organizations, and families, to end limiting cycles and reframe challenges into lasting breakthroughs and peak performance. With Sounds True, Judy Wilkins-Smith is the author of a new book. It's called Decoding Your Emotional Blueprint, A Powerful Guide to Transformation Through Disentangling Multi-Generational Patterns. I loved talking to Judy. Quite honestly, I found her to be one of the most unconditionally empowering people I've ever met. Her work helps us transform some of the most entrenched patterning that we have, the patterns we've inherited from our family lineages, such that we choose to evolve, and we gift our ancestors with our evolutionary expression. Here's my conversation with Judy Wilkins-Smith. Judy, by way of introduction, can you share with our listeners a bit about your background and how you came to be doing constellation work and systems-based work in working with individuals?

Judy Wilkins-Smith (2:23)

Sure. So I'm originally from South Africa, moved over to the US, and we've been here for a short while when my father was killed. And it was a case of either write books or go crazy, and I decided that it was probably better to write books.

So I started writing fiction and I think it was about the third book. I was looking for a piece of information and stumbled upon this person who was already doing systemic work in constellations. And he said, come study my work and I'll help you with your book. So I went and studied his work and got zero help with the book. But that was the journey that began it. And I think once I picked it up, I realized it was something that I've probably been speaking for a long time, but not had a language for. And this gave it that language. I think I'd always known that there was more to us and our history than we were aware of, and that there were a lot of secrets or mysteries or possibilities contained in that. So if we have a look, though, somebody said to me about halfway through my studying, you know what, of course you'd know this. And I said, why, why, of course? And they said, because it began in South Africa with the Zulu tribe. Hellinger went down there to go and tame the Zulus, and they tamed him instead. He realized quite early in that anytime they had a problem, they would go and explore their ancestry to see what was happening. And the strange thing was, I came from the healthcare arena, and when I left that position, the person who gave my farewell was a Zulu gentleman. And he said, You may be leaving us, but you'll find a way to represent us in the world. And I laughed and I said, Yeah, right. And now I do it every day.

Tami Simon (4:16)

Now you referenced Bert Hellinger, who's credited with being the person who formed, who founded Constellation Work. For people who are hearing about this for the first time, and they're like, What is Constellation Work? What is a systems-based approach to transformation? Give us an orientation.

Judy Wilkins-Smith (4:37)

Okay, so I'm going to use three terms. So your systemic work, your constellations, and then mine, which is emotional DNA, which is a bit of a build out. So systemic work is the study of you within a system. You didn't happen in a vacuum. Who you are came from thousands of years of all sorts of experiences, behaviors, thoughts, feelings, actions, that have accumulated and passed down to you. So you don't just inherit your physical DNA, you inherit your emotional DNA. So that's what I call emotional DNA, your patterns of thoughts, feelings, and actions that you've inherited. So it's the study of you within a system and your emotional DNA. And the breakthrough approach that we use is constellations. Thanks Bert Hellinger for the term, because everybody says, oh, are you an astrologer? No. In this work, a constellation is a grouping of elements within a home system. So your family system is your mother, your father, your sister, your brother, your grandparents, somebody who may have influenced you dramatically, those all belong in the family system. And when we can show you by taking your inner picture of how that looks, what it looks like in front of you, we choose representatives to represent each one of those elements, like mom, like dad, like sister, like brother. And then I will ask the client to place them for me, the way that it is for them in relationship to each other. So we might find mom and dad are close together, brother and sister are far apart or mother's off in the distance and dad is close to the children. And by just seeing that picture, we're engaging multiple senses. So it's vision, sound, touch, taste, smell. And so now you're having a multi-sensorial experience of your system. And as I ask questions more and more of the history surfaces, until you're seeing the issue, its origins, its effects, what pattern wants to stop and what pattern is trying to start through you. And because it's multi-sensorial, you have that embodied experience which begins to rewire thoughts, feelings, and actions in the moment. So often what we will hear is, how come I've been somewhere for 20 years to try and resolve this? And it's resolved in an hour and a half. It's because you have that total sensation and the total experience that just goes boom and starts to rewire. That's the constellation.